"Like a termite-infested wagon, it just falls apart the longer it goes."

An Amish man is lynched by Montana ranchers not keen on losing land to the Amish homestead, while the law won’t lift a finger to help. Regular raids onto the holy men’s land are becoming more and more frequent when a wounded gunfighter (Tim Daly) stumbles onto the property. The widow of the murdered man (Naomi Watts) cares for the gunfighter until he’s well, upon which time he hangs about to keep the bad guys at bay and slowly engage in a forbidden affair with the Amish woman.

The Amish have always been fodder for Hollywood whenever the biz needed a fish out of water story on the quick. Such drivel as the Tim Allen comedy, For Richer or Poorer, generally makes out the Amish folks to be backward Germanic hicks with no time for anything but raising the odd barn, churning some butter and saying “ja” a lot. In the aforementioned comedy (and I use that term loosely), everything was just peachy keen as soon as Kirsty Alley taught the Amish folks to wear colorful clothing. On the other hand, in this drama (and again I use the term loosely), everything is just peachy keen when the Amish kid learns how to use a slingshot on the bad guys and mom decides that humping the gunfighter is more important than her religion and family.

Well, that’s nice.

At it’s best when it allows itself to be a simple western gun-fighting story, The Outsider generally loses its way when it tries to be a morality tale. Naomi Watts’ character seems to be terribly torn about whether she should submit to her passions, thereby damning herself to being shunned by her people, but a little horizontal rumba or two later and she’s throwing her Amish garb into the dirt and frolicking naked. Granted, the audience probably doesn’t want to endure three months of bad moods and depression from the female lead, but seeing as the film takes a good hour to even get beyond the ‘healing and getting to know you’ stage, the sudden drive for speed doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

It makes more sense, however, when you learn that the screenplay (written by Jenny Wingfield) was adapted from a Penelope Williamson novel. It’s a common problem when screenwriters adapt from a novel, that by the time they’ve got to the halfway point in the script, they realize they’ve only actually gone through 1/4 of the book, leaving them speeding through scenes to try to catch up from that point on. Good screenwriters can work around this problem, but I fear Jenny Wingfield might not find herself in that category.

Essentially, there’s a lot of cliché and a lot of easy answers in The Outsider that dull whatever impact the strong performances from Tim Daly and Naomi Watts might have left on the viewer. The awfully predictable ending takes that dull impact and flushes it down the toilet, leaving you wonder exactly why you just spent the last two hours watching the thing.

Supporting roles by Keith and David Carradine don’t even come close to saving matters. I had high hopes. They were dashed, one by one. Avoid.